We've identified a long-standing bug that caused some entities to bypass some game-mode damage multipliers. Those entities were dealing less damage than expected in training mode and when playing as a Raider against an Antagonist as well.

Note that this hasn't been affecting game balance. The game has always been balanced around that bug, however, we had less control over damage input and output than we thought. When this bug is fixed, all numbers will be adjusted accordingly and we'll be able to more correctly adjust these abilities' power levels.

This is fixed in our internal version but is not published along with this patch yet. A patch will follow soon featuring these adjustments.

HUD

In Spacdelords, we've structured player advancement in terms of levels. Players gain levels fairly quickly, specially at the beginning, gaining close to one level per match for the first 10-15 levels. Most of those level-ups, however, don't provide much direct player power. Spacelords is a shooter and ultimately, a game of skill. Power imbalance is only actually meaningful at around 20-30 level differences.

This contrasts heavily with how level differences convey power in most other videogames. A PVP battle with a 20 level difference on most MMO or ARPG games is not a fair contest at all. Veteran players know Spacelords well and adjust their expectations accordingly. New players, however, have previous knowledge from other games and have negative reactions when they see these differences.

Spacelords also structures players into Tiers. Tiers are a much better indicator of power difference. If a Tier 6 is playing against a Tier 5, it looks like there's some power difference. When a Tier 6 faces a Tier 4, the power difference is clearly bigger. Clearly put, tiers better represent power differences between players than levels do.

- Players now show their Tier Rank in matches instead of their level.

Some players have achieved levels far beyond the level 100 required for Tier 1. This is a great accomplishment and we want to properly reward that in terms of prestige towards other players. We are very concerned that with this change we're removing the only feature that shows everyone how hard those players have worked. Our next update will feature a new system that will properly reward these players with much more that just a level show-off, however, in the meantime, we appreciate your patience and understanding.

DIFFICULTY

There are many aspects to match difficulty, enemy health, damage, AI behavior and sheer amount of on-screen enemies. We've tuned how we apply difficulty increases to make sure that difficulty is felt as an interesting, challenging change (more enemies, more intelligent) rather than straight power upgrades (damage and resistance upgrades, commonly known as bullet-sponge enemies).

- All game difficulties has been adjusted. Simply put, this should feel like more but less powerful enemies.

ANTAGONIST

Playing as a Raider or as the Antagonist should be a matter of personal preference. Playing as a Raider is a cooperative, very tactical experience. Playing as the Antagonist is stressful and a massive check of skill. This decision should not be about how to maximize your gold income.

- Greatly increased the defeat score range for the Antagonist. Antagonists can now get higher scores when losing if they performed well.

MATCHMAKING AND MMR

As the MMR system stood, Raiders and Antagonists were experiencing the same amount of MMR change after each match. There's a few problems with that; It creates MMR inflation and it doesn't properly reflect the skill check that each player has gone through.

- Antagonists experience much bigger (x4) MMR changes after each match than Raiders do. This cancels out overall MMR gains to keep inflation on check and also distinguishes playing as the Antagonist as the big skill check it is.- Raiders playing against an Antagonist experience smaller MMR changes than they did before this patch. Of all matchups, this is the one with the most uncertainty. The system can draw less accurate conclusions from it. - Raiders not facing an Antagonist will experience bigger MMR changes than they did before this patch. Of all matchups, this is the most accurate one (AI difficulties are very consistent) and the skill check is quite accurate, if only a bit dissolved across four players.

AEQUILIBRIUM

Aequilibrium was balanced around (public, non-guild) Tiers, where the number of players oscilates between 20 and 30. Guilds brought new private and smaller groups, which were being excessively affected by Aequilibrium drift.

- Fixed a rare bug where the game was not starting some matches. - Fixed a bug caused by the Beholders' attack that could crash the game. - Fixed a bug where the game could crash when using Rak Mayura's ability right before winning a mission. - Fixed a bug where Harec could become invulnerable when using Firmness card. - Fixed a bug where HIVE's Shy was unintendedly piercing through shields. - Fixed several bugs related to projectile generation. - Fixed a few behavior issues affecting Guardians in A Breath of Hope. - Fixed a bug where extraction missions were not ending properly if there was any Cortez brother on the game. - Fixed several bugs related to Chat. - Fixed a bug where the Squad invite system was not working properly.

KNOWN ISSUES

Aneska's rare weapon's name is "Solaris" in-game and "Invicta" on the store, this latter is the intended name and will be changed in the next update.

After her defeat at the hands of the Raiders, Aneska found herself alone in a hostile planet. After considering her options and reuniting with her loyal war machine, Aneska decided that the time had come to fight for a cause she deemed worth fighting for.

She grudgingly admired Harec’s courage and skill as a leader. In the past, Aneska had thought the Raiders to be a ragged brotherhood, composed by outcasts and defectors and pariahs, but now she realized that description fitted her only too well…

Hans is the kind of guy fond of sharing war stories. For him, there’s nothing like the old times, and some of his grumpy witticism might sound odd to the newer generations, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. “Back in the day, if you couldn’t solve a situation with Napalm, it was because you weren’t using enough Napalm”, he always says when remembering the Terraforming Wars on Mars, where Hans earned the nickname “Vulcano” thanks to using his Tarasque F-750 -a weapon able to fire Napalm munitions, ideal for covering an attack or a retreat with a wall of fire. Armed with the F-750, Hans single-handedly managed to stall the Humblebee clan’s offensive, becoming one of the heroes of the war.

SpaceGuilds, the first milestone in Spacelords’ ambitious Roadmap is now available. This new, game-changer feature is now available for all PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows 10 and PC Steam players of MercurySteam’s 4 v 1 Free to Play shooter. You can watch the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_6__rqVR0c

Upon creating a new SpaceGuild, players will be able to team-up with friends and fight for better rewards and beating the highest scores in each of Spacelords’ 17 free missions. These SpaceGuilds can even be formed up by cross-platform players, with Steam users allying with PlayStation 4 players, or with Xbox One and Windows 10 players.

Each SpaceGuild can be customized with its own unique name, emblem and pennant, proudly displaying the Guild’s colours for all players to see. Admission to a SpaceGuild can be made public or private, and all members will have access to a team chat, to better coordinate their missions and set up the right strategy.

But the SpaceGuilds update is also packed with many other new and exciting features based on the Spacelords’ community feedback. These new additions have been designed for both new and veteran players alike, in the form of revised weapons and missions, the inclusion of an ingame radar system, over 200 new Character Cards and an integrated troubleshooting system.

Spacelords Roadmap’s first major update, SpaceGuilds, is around the corner. These last days we have revealed some of the adjustements and new features coming to the game, like the Radar or the Cortez Brothers, but there’s a lot more to come! In a new episode of Inside Spacelords, Community Manager Karen Hernández explains all the changes, including the arrival of the awaited Guilds.

As it happened with some of the maps we built for Spacelords, a number of the first weapons we introduced earlier in the game felt a bit outdated compared with more modern options that have been added later on.

The upcoming SpaceGuilds update will see some of the most emblematic weapons overhauled. For some, that means an update of their stats, but in some cases the design team has devised new properties and even alternate fire modes!

Let’s have a look at the weapons that have received this special treatment:

• Harec’s Ignis Fugit: Each successful shot will add a bullet to an alternate magazine -to a maximum of five. Each bullet in that alternate magazine will score a critical hit.

• Doldren’s Bloody Mary: This gun is now easier to use, with a simplified version of its firing mechanism. The sound effects and animations have been updated to better reflect the quality of the ammunition used.

• Mikah's Granny: Each successful shot fills a gauge. The more you fill that gauge with one magazine, the more precise the next one will become.

Revisiting old weapons in the Raiders’ arsenal has been a lot of fun for the development team. Please, let us know how you like these revamped weapons in the Spacelords Official Forum, Twitter and Facebook.

As a Free to Play game, Spacelords welcomes lots of new players who try the game for the first time every day. Most players are curious about Spacelords unique features and gameplay, but inevitably there are some who decide it is not a game for them, and quit the match. That’s perfectly fine -you can’t please everybody- but the rest of the team will be left in a disadvantage, having to face the invading factions and maybe even an Antagonist with an understrength squad.

It may be also the case that players lose their connection to the game, and while they try to reconnect their teammates would struggle to achieve the mission’s objectives. Well, no more. The Cortez family comes to the rescue!

When the SpaceGuilds update goes live, if a player disconnects from a game one of Cortez’s brothers will teleport into the fray, taking the player’s place. Far from being mere AIs, the Cortez bros are quite capable allies, able to hold their ground against the toughest enemies. Moreover, when they are killed, their demise won’t detract from the Raiders’ lives pool. Of course, if the missing players reconnect to the game, they will rejoin the fight and Cortez’s brothers will teleport back to the Beluga.

We reckon this is a useful (and fun!) new feature that will help solving a recurrent but unavoidable problem. We hope you enjoy it and look forward hearing what you think of it in the Spacelords Official Forum, Twitter and Facebook.

See you on the Broke… Wait, what? Didn’t you know Cortez had brothers? Didn’t we mention that before? And what are those rumours saying that Dr. Kuzmann was seen leaving Cortez’s dormitory with his toothbrush in a medical sample container?

SpaceGuilds, the first major update in the Spacelords Roadmap, is almost upon us. As you can expect, the Guilds are the main focus of this update, and we will offer much more information about how they work in the following days. But there are many, many new features, tweaks and refinements included in this milestone that deserve their time under the spotlight. Today, we will focus on a new feature that will be quite handy for Raiders and Antagonists alike: The Radar.

We have been considering adding a radar for some time, and the feedback received from our community convinced us to finally implement it in the game. We have gone through many different iterations until we settled for a version that worked along the game’s mechanics.

As you can see, the radar itself is simple and functional. Located in the lower left corner, it will pop up when you have enemies in your vicinity. Your foes will be shown as red blips of varying sizes -those located on your same altitude will be shown as dot of equal size as yours, while others above and below your position will appear as bigger and smaller blips, respectively.

The inclusion of a radar makes the tactical management of Aleph and the stress levels even more important. Raiders and Antagonists will only be visible on the radar when they are stressed.

You can use this to your advantage by keeping your stress level under control and moving literally under the radar, or doing the exact opposite and luring your rivals to an ambush, or divert their attention from the main objective. The choice is yours!

Enemy elites and special enemies, like a final boss, will be also shown in the radar with special icons.

The inclusion of the radar will hopefully add a new dimension to your Spacelords games, and we are looking forward seeing new strategies emerging around it when it goes live along the SpaceGuilds update -coming really soon!

What do you think of this new feature? Let us know your opinion in the Spacelords Official Forum, Twitter and Facebook.

MercurySteam is working with actress and model Stefanie Joosten on the creation of a brand-new playable character for Spacelords! This new character will be available in Early 2019.

“I met with several MercurySteam team members at a gaming convention last year, where I had the chance to play Spacelords for the first time and was very impressed by the unique visual style of the game,” commented Stefanie Joosten. “We agreed it would be cool to collaborate in the future if the opportunity ever arose, and I am really happy to say that the time is here and now!”

After playing the character Quiet in Konami’s Metal Gear Solid V, Joosten will now lend her image and voice talents to play the role of Sööma, a member of the Umbra Wardogs faction, born in the Cydonia region, on distant Mars, as part of a seclusive cult devoted to helping those who suffer pain and oppression.

Sööma joined the ill-fated expedition to the Broken Planet as a rite of passage into her Order’s senior echelons. But the terrible reality of the war raging over the Broken Planet will put her beliefs and natural kindness to the test.

“Sööma is a really interesting, layered character to play,” adds Joosten. “She possesses great inner strength and fights with the conviction of someone who is certain her cause is just, but still harbors a naivety that will clash with the conflict she is about to become involved with.”

“We have a standing commitment to our community to continue adding top-quality content to Spacelords, and creating this new, iconic character in collaboration with Ms. Joosten adds a whole new level of depth and charisma to Sööma,” said Enric Álvarez, Studio Director. “It has been a real pleasure working with Stefanie. We are sure Sööma will become a major “fan favourite” for all our players!”

The latest game update includes what we expect to be an improvement of the reward system for high-level matches.

We've been receiving feedback about high-difficulty matches whose rewards do not feel equivalent to the invested effort from the players.

We consider that matches should be rewarded because of the challenge they offer, so we've done a full readjustment on game difficulties which aims to disperse the population along a more diverse MMR range. This also allowed us to greatly increase the weight of the MMR on the match final score calculation and to reduce time, death and extraction importance over the score as well.

From now, higher scores - which imply higher rewards- will be more accessible and frequent on high level matches.

The 11.3 Update will be available today, including a brand new weapon for the Raiders’ leader, Harec – The “Easter Egg”.

Welcome to the second instalment of the State of the Game Address. As with our previous article, we want to shed some light over some of the more candent topics and concerns shared by our community.

We have been following many threads in our official forums, and in our Twitter and Facebook accounts, about Spacelords’ difficulty and MMR systems, two different but closely intertwined concepts. We hope the following post helps shedding some light over this subject.

From the moment they start playing, all Spacelords players have an MMR rating, that takes form as they win or lose matches. Since the MMR rating is not always a perfect indicator, it exists a “K” uncertainty factor that determines how reliable one player’s MMR factor really is. The more the players game, the lower their “K” uncertainty factor is. That’s the reason why games with new users appear to be the more unbalanced ones -they need to play a few games until the system is able to provide them with an appropriate challenge.

So, what’s the MMR exactly?

We could define it as the players’ capacity to win games. It is their effective ability, indicated by the sum of different factors:

- Their accuracy and positioning over the field of battle. - Selecting the Raider best suited for the mission at hand. - Their capacity of forging weapons and choosing a good combination of Cards.

Now, let’s have a look at the difficulty. We will differentiate between games with and without Antagonist.

4 Raiders Coop Game without Antagonist:

On these games, difficulty levels are determined by the players’ average MMR. The resulting figure is a number between 0 and 100 that affects both the AI and the mission on many different parameters:

- Enemy AI parameters: damage (shooting and melee), endurance, speed, intelligence and special abilities in the case of Aleph-charged elites.

In summary, the difficulty level in a game without Antagonist is determined by the mission’s own elements, and directly affects the rewards; the higher the difficulty, the better the rewards.

4 Raiders Coop Game against an Antagonist:

First of all, it needs to be said that the percentage of difficulty doesn’t affect a game the same way when there is an Antagonist present. For example, the challenge presented by an AI with a 30% difficulty in a game without Antagonist is not equivalent to that of an AI with a 30% difficulty fighting alongside an Antagonist. On the same vein, the mission design may offer the Antagonists some extra opportunities to achieve their goals, causing that the differences between MMRs become more evident.

Spacelords is a shooter, a genre where the skill breach between a top player and a casual player is very high. The Antagonist mode introduces 3 main variables to the mix: The Raiders’ MMR, the Antagonist’s MMR and the difficulty ratio. This 3-sided matchmaking is a very potent tool that serves a very concrete goal: teaming together people with diverse skills.

Matchmaking Raiders and Antagonists of different skill levels is very important! It speeds up finding new games and benefices the quality of the connection by finding the closest server available. The following would be the win-loss ratio we’d obtain if we leave the AI with an average difficulty in games including an Antagonist with an MMR ranged between 20% and 40%, facing a team of Raiders with a 30% MMR:

Given that win-loss ratio, including an Antagonist with an MMR below 26% or above 34% would result on a highly unbalanced game. This considerably limits the chances of finding a suitable Antagonist for the Raiders.

Well-balanced games are always more fun to play, with players focussing on the mission goals and offering a more unpredictable outcome. By adjusting the difficulty (the AI’s skill) we can expand the number of Antagonists available for a game:

Now the win-loss ratios are acceptable for Antagonists with an MMR between 20% and 40%! We use the AI’s difficulty setting to equalize the fight between raiders and Antagonists, but always bearing in mind that players with better MMR have better chances to win.

Increasing the difficulty is used to smooth out games with an Antagonist, but it is not considered for calculating the rewards. Both Raiders and Antagonists obtain rewards based on their rival’s MMR; the higher that MMR is, the more rewards they obtain.

In short, in games where an Antagonist could appear, the difficulty settings are used to widen the number of Raiders and Antagonists that could play together, always respecting the axiom that states that the more skilled players should win a higher number of games. Thus, the challenge you will be facing will be equivalent to your rival’s skill, and the rewards will be increased accordingly.

We hope you have found this post informative. If you have any questions, let us know in our official forums, and on our Twitter and Facebook accounts, and the team will be happy to give you an answer. Thank you all and see you on the Broken Planet!

Bad streaks on Blueprint draws are rare thanks to the bonus chance after losing one Blueprint in a previous round, however, they are very unpleasing when they do happen. We've removed the loss of the Blueprint prize in the main map after losing the draw.

- One-time rewards are no longer consumed when you lose the draw. - Mission requisite to get a Common Blueprint changed from "Win the mission" to "Score over 2"

ANTAGONIST

Playing as the Antagonist is meant to be challenging, but it's not meant to be a burden on the economy of the player. We've adjusted Antagonist's scores so that they will, on average, be similar to those of the Raiders and thus, earn the same amount of gold, faction points and have the same shot at blueprints as Raiders do. This means that Antagonist's scores may be well over 5 even when they lose the match if they perform good enough.

- Raider kills and match time now have more weight on score calculation. - Antagonists can now get a scores above 5 even after losing a game.

MISSIONS

With the last patch we introduced a delay on using Dr.Kuzmann's levers without properly adressing the duration of Shae's electrocution. We're adressing this along with some extra touches on the Council Apocalypse campaign.

- Fixed a bug that caused the main menu to freeze sometimes and block any possible action. - Fixed a bug where the game was not giving PlayStation Plus’ associated skins to some users. - Fixed a bug where the Antagonist could spawn in a different point than selected. - Fixed a bug on Upside Down where the game could crash if the Raiders lost the match with an Elite soldier grab. - Fixed several game crashes related to host migrations. - Fixed a bug where Matchmaking was not working properly after cancelling a match in a squad. - Fixed several bugs related to the squad system. - Fixed a bug where Doldren's Bloody Mary was not resetting the score after reloading. - Fixed a bug where if two Doldrens were on the same match with Bloody Mary, both weapons shared their score. - Fixed a bug where Ginebra's S. Bogen C-A00 was not applying push correctly to Fifth Council's Elite Assault units. - Fixed a bug where Lycus shield was not suffering damage from enemy bullets.